Lousy

How to spell lousy

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce lousy

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does lousy mean?

1. adjectiveOf very poor quality, or extremely bad and unpleasant.

Lousy in a sentence

• The hotel gave us a lousy room overlooking the car park.

• He did a lousy job of patching the roof, so it leaked again.

Where does lousy come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word is built directly on 'louse', the small parasitic insect, which descends from the Old English 'lus' and has solid Germanic roots, related to the Dutch 'luis' and the German 'Laus'. By the late 1300s English had attached the adjective suffix '-y' to form 'lousy', whose literal sense was simply 'infested with lice', a real and unpleasant complaint in earlier centuries. From that grim literal beginning the word drifted into a general term of contempt, coming to mean 'filthy', 'mean', or 'thoroughly bad', a sense well established by the 1800s. A more colourful slang use also grew up, 'lousy with', meaning over-supplied with something, as in being lousy with money. The spelling trap is that the silent 'e' of 'louse' disappears and the 's' is followed by '-y', so writers must remember 'lousy' has no 'e' and only one 's'.

How the word is built

• louse (from Old English lus, a parasitic insect)
• -y (adjective suffix), with the spelling shifting from -ouse to -ous before the suffix